Properly addressing rural shrinking? Overview of territorially unbalanced support programmes in Spain

Abstract

Depopulation is very present in a large part of rural Spain. The central government is implementing a programme (with three different schemes) to support rural actors to foster social and economic development. The lack of social and private initiatives is pointed out by the government as the main reason, which explains that most of the funds are addressed to local public bodies, and not to social participation and entrepreneurship measures. In addition, the results indicate that there is an unbalanced territorial distribution of funds, which does not correspond to the areas where rural shrinking processes are most intense. These results draw attention to the need to introduce some corrective mechanisms in this public policy.

Keywords

• Rural shrinking
• local public bodies
• entrepreneurship
• non-governmental organisation (NGO)
• Spain
• Codes: R11